The institute will organize in June 2012 this summer school, which will concentrate top-level international expertise to teach a dozen students techniques and concepts in experimental systems neuroscience. Lectures and lab sessions will focus on modern optical and electrophysiological methods to study the connectivity and function of neuronal circuits.

RIST’s Marius F. Danca has found that if the control parameter p, of a continuous-time nonlinear system belonging to a large class of systems, is switched within a set of chosen values in a deterministic or even random manner, while the underlying model is numerically integrated, the obtained attractor is a numerical approximation of one of the existing attractors of the considered system.

Our scientists have found that the internal timescale of the brain, i.e., the time window needed by neurons to encode a given aspect of the visual stimulus, is tightly correlated to the external timescale of the visual stimulus, i.e., the speed with which the visual image on the retina changes.

The partnership between the institute’s Center for Cognitive and Neural Studies (Coneural) and the prestigious Max Plank Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, has been extended for another 2 years (2011-2013), after an evaluation of the work performed in the previous 3 years. Peter Gruss, the President of the Max Planck Society (Germany), stated in the renewal letter: “It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity to inform you of the very successful outcome of the mid-term review of your Partner Group. The review report points out the impressive scientific output of the Partner Group during the first three years since its inception. I congratulate you upon this success”.

The institute’s scientists have developed a special visualization technique for how multiple neurons fire spikes together to encode information, by representing the identity of firing patterns of multiple neurons with color sequences.